In conventional telephone networks, parties place telephone calls on a regular basis, often, according to a predefined or predetermined schedule. In such cases, the party placing these repetitive calls is relegated to keeping an independent schedule to remind him/herself to place the calls and, moreover has to physically place the call at the scheduled time. As such, the calling party expends valuable time and resources in tracking and performing these scheduled calls. The burden of maintaining and following schedule can lead to missed calls that can spell disaster in certain critical situations. Moreover, tracking, scheduling, and placing these periodic and important phone calls takes up the party's time which could otherwise be used for other purposes.
In recent years, a number of new telephone service features have been provided by an AIN. The AIN evolved out of a need to increase the capabilities of the telephone network architecture in order to meet the growing needs of telephone customers or users. The AIN architecture generally comprises two networks, a data messaging network and a trunked communications network. The trunked communications network handles voice and data communications between dispersed network locations, whereas the data messaging network is provided for controlling operations of the trunked communications network.
While the AIN architecture has been used to provide numerous services to telephone customers, there is presently no telephone system that allows parties to schedule phone calls with the telephone network such that the party may schedule a call by inputting the date and time of the call with the telephone network in advance, whereby the telephone network and the telephone network may remind the party of the schedule and place the call according to the inputted call information.
From the foregoing it is appreciated that there exists a need for a system and methods to allow parties to schedule telephone calls using a telephone interface. By having this ability, the drawbacks of the prior art are overcome.